Lessons In User Experience According To Parkour Philosophy — March 14th, 2010
Efficiency, How-To, Parkour, Productivity, User Experience

What do you think about Parkour? Crazy youngsters in sneakers running out of control? Definetely not. Parkour philosophy goes far beyond that, and curiously we can learn a lot about it from a user experience point of view. Interested?

Parkour Principles Are Efficiency And Speed

The average yuppie is walking fast paced in the morning, but stops when the traffic light is red. More temerarious is the runaway boy who crosses the road ignoring the cars and risking his physical integrity. But if the guy you see coordinates a smart move to dodge the bike, the car and the ice cream truck, then you are in front of the true parkourist.

If one thing characterizes Parkour practitioners (aka traceurs) it is the obsession to take the most direct path between two cartographic points, overcoming all kind of obstacles encountered along the way. Efficiency and speed are the two prime characteristics of Parkour philosophy, but also an extremely keen spatial awareness is necessary.
The traceur body is the synergic response of mind's goal and Parkour's motto: run fast and run efficient, to be and to last.

Ok But, What About The User Experience?

As the traceur runs along the crowded route, he stylishly negotiates all the obstacles with pinpoint accuracy. A full set of predefined movements is hard-wired in the brain of the skilled parkourist, who selects the optimal action for any given situation occurred during the urban sprint.

While sitting in front of our computer and doing our daily tasks we do not have to worry about the overpopulated streets outside the office.
However, we have to deal with other kind of overpopulation, that which applies to the multiple screens floating on the screen at the same time. Multiple applications, browser tabs, gadgets and gizmos running at the same time, distracting us from our focus, either it is launching an application or open a recently saved document. So much windows that we sometimes easily become disoriented.

Fortunately, there are some basic maneuvers that will help us to accomplish our goals in a super-optimal manner, reducing time and effort. So, as parkourist running over a silicon based medium we should hard-wire the tactics that allow to overcome all the quotidian user's experience obstacles.

The Tactics Of Efficiency

Launchers give you a boost. Traceurs make use of a movement called Passe muraille when overcoming a tall structure placed across the path.
The most powerful tool for passing over all the opened windows or just jump to an action is using a launcher. My favorite one is Quicksilver, which is always ready to prompt me, and search and launch what I am typing for on demand.
Once you start using a good launcher you will think that opening an application by double-clicking over its icon, is a matter of cavemen.
Shortcuts rock. Combinations of two or more keys are kinda Saut de précision. You can do practically all you can imagine with that. By pressing cmd (or ctrl) plus a function key you can do basic operations such as open, close, minimize, copy, paste, undo, redo, or quit. But also more advanced stuff like styling text, switch between the browser tabs, open contextual screens, screen shots, and much more.
So, I suggest to keep your thumb over cmd (or ctrl) key being ready to perform fast Sauts de précision.
Keep your fingers over alt + tab. Passements serve the parkourist to overcome an obstacle by jumping side-ways first, then placing one hand on the obstacle to self-right the body and continue running.
With alt + tab we can switch between any running program without using the mouse. Without any doubts alt + tab is the king of tactics.
Exploit autocompletition. Noticing how the system predicts —or suggests— your next words as you write something is just awesome. We should take advantage of this. So, whether if it is Spotlight, or Google query suggestions make sure to pay special attention on what is automatically appearing in the search box as you type. Picking a suggestion is usually faster than typing the text completely.
Do not forget recent items. One of the things that means a save in time is to reopen recently stored files through the recent items menu.
Similarly, and also influenced by the principle of locality, is a good idea to create smart folders with all your documents modified today, and use it as a reference buffer for the whole working day. Your productivity is gonna takeoff. Sure.

But Wait. What About Free Running?

Sometimes free running is interpreted as synonym of Parkour, but purists insist that Parkour emphasizes on efficiency while free running gives priority to creativity and visually appealing movements.
Here I want to point that if you seek creativity instead of —or complementary to— using the tactics of efficiency, you may be interested on features such us Mac's Exposé, Windows's Flip 3D, or Linux's Compiz.
All of these features have been presumably developed in order to improve efficiency too, but I should say their flamboyancy can only help to impress your friends and colleagues in a more efficient manner ;)